On the Record

By: Caryn Tamber

Back in 2007, I wrote about the fascinating case of a Mississippi convicted killer and the Ober Kaler lawyers who were helping with his post-conviction appeals.

At first, Alan Michael Rubenstein claimed to have stumbled on the decomposing bodies of his stepson, stepson’s wife and their 4-year-old daughter. But he was later convicted of killing the family himself in order to collect the insurance money on his step-granddaughter. In my story, the Ober team said there were a number of irregularities in Rubenstein’s trial:

The Ober Kaler team says the evidence was not as clear as prosecutors made it out to be. They say there were major problems with a forensic expert’s testimony at trial. They say Rubenstein may not have done it, and will try to persuade Mississippi courts to order a new trial.

“My theory is that jurors wanted to convict somebody of this very horrible crime, especially when there’s a little girl and the pictures are gruesome,” [former Ober partner Ray] Shepard said. “I believe Mr. Rubenstein may, in fact, be innocent.”

The team has a tough battle ahead. The highest court in Mississippi has already soundly rejected most of Rubenstein’s direct appeal claims, and the prosecutors who handled Rubenstein’s case at the trial level say there is no doubt he is the killer.

“He’s a con man and a shyster,” said Dunn Lampton, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, who handled the case when he was district attorney of Pike County, Miss. “He’s just an unbelievably evil human being.”

Rubenstein was originally sentenced to death, but the Mississippi Supreme Court vacated that sentence in 2006.

I just discovered that last month, Rubenstein was resentenced to life without the possibility of parole, which will run concurrently with his two other life sentences.